Erin E. M. Hattonhttps://erinemhatton.com
Dream. Imagine. Explore.Thu, 08 Mar 2018 03:15:47 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://erinemhatton.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/cropped-erine-m-hatton-dark-font.png?w=32Erin E. M. Hattonhttps://erinemhatton.com
3232A Little Breatherhttps://erinemhatton.com/2016/10/19/a-little-breather/
https://erinemhatton.com/2016/10/19/a-little-breather/#respondWed, 19 Oct 2016 17:06:02 +0000http://erinemhatton.com/?p=2148Continue reading A Little Breather]]>Hey there, blog readers. You may have noticed I’ve missed my last couple of posts. To be honest, I needed to take a step back and figure out how best to use my time. It turns out that if I blog regularly, I don’t take much time to actually write.

So, because this blog is pretty pointless without new books to blog about, I’m taking a little hiatus from blogging. I’ll still post excerpts at least once a month, so you can have a peek of what I’m working on. And I’ll still blog for Word Alive Press and Redwood Park Communities once a month, but I want to take more time to do the kind of writing I love best. I hope you’ll understand.

Please feel free to check out my books page, and peruse my archives for the time being.

In this new sneak peek of my work in progress, Hold Fast, a historical novel based on a true story, I imagine Ann McIntyre invited for a visit to Conrad Gugy’s manor while her sons and friends live in scarcity in the refugee camp on his land at Machiche. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

The footman announced dinner and they went through, into a dining room lavishly starred with beeswax candles in silver candelabra, to sit at a table draped in fine linen and laden with delicate china and silverware. Ann’s stomach dropped at the thought of the Casses back at the camp with her sons, crammed around a single greasy tallow candle with wooden bowls cradled in their laps, dipping a half slice of bread into a meagre bowl of thin stew. She laid her linen napkin across her lap with trembling hands as the footman reached for the soup ladle and filled her bowl with the first of many courses.

Though her stomach growled ravenously, she could barely finish a single helping. By the dessert course her belly was painfully distended. Course after course, the footman carried away dishes still heaping with uneaten food. Ann followed the platters and tureens with her eyes, thinking all the while of her children and friends starving while she glutted herself. The feast turned sour in her stomach.

Dinner conversation came no more easily. Although she fell into the patterns of inane babble and gossip without trouble, the words were as heavy in her mouth as the food in her stomach. Any mention she made of the Loyalists’ plight Gugy lightly deflected away. As the last of the food vanished to the kitchen, Ann could bear it no longer.

“Excuse my boldness, but could I ask something?”

Gugy blinked. “Of course.”

“Could I bring the leftover food back with me to the camp?”

Miss Wilkinson drew in her breath sharply and let out a little giggle, cut off abruptly as she obviously realized Ann was not joking.

Gugy took a deep breath and blew it out slowly through his nose, regarding her through narrowed eyes. He rested his chin on his hand. Ann clutched her hands together in her lap, holding her breath. At last he spoke, hands steepled against his lips. “I understand your request. But I have been assured that the rations given to the refugees are sufficient. To send food back with you for a select few would show favouritism that I simply cannot afford to show.”

Ann let out her breath in a rush, as though someone had punched her. “You have been assured? By whom? Because I assure you: the rations are not sufficient. Not at all.”

Gugy opened his mouth and closed it, laying his napkin on the table. Dinner was over.

“Still, you must understand…” His eyes were wide, pleading. Afraid, perhaps, or sympathetic?

Ann looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “I understand.”

Miss Wilkinson looked from Gugy to Ann and back again, eyes wide. She smiled tightly at Ann, then. “Won’t you join me in the drawing room?”

Ann considered it, for a moment. Perhaps they would play a game of cards while Gugy recovered his composure over a glass of port and a cheroot. Perhaps Ann would have another chance to play the spinet. Perhaps they would talk, as ladies did, of the roads and the weather and of poetry. But poetry was the last thing on Ann’s mind.

“I fear I’m much too tired. I don’t have the same stamina I used to.” Ann rose from the table, forcing Gugy to rise, as well. “Forgive me.”

“Of course.” Gugy tapped a finger on the table.

“Thank you for the lovely evening.” Ann curtseyed to her hosts and turned, walking as quickly as propriety would allow.

She hurried out into the chill night and turned toward the distant and faint lights of the camp down by the river. A misty rain spattered her face, but it was oddly welcome. If comforts like a merry fire and hearty food, music and conversation came with the knowledge that her friends did without, then they were cold comforts indeed.

She wouldn’t accept another invitation to dine with Gugy, or anyone else. Not that she expected another invitation to Grandpré after tonight. Likely Gugy and his mistress’ idle curiosity was well satisfied now.

Here’s another sneak peek of my upcoming YA fantasy novel, Everdream. Kynan has just entered the Dragon’s vale, seeing for the first time just how much damage a dragon can do. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

He moved as quickly as he might, though the uneven ground and the shrouding mist made progress slower than he would have liked. Soon more and more shapes materialized in the white void. Trees—or what had once been trees. They stood tall, still, but leafless, even branchless, and black. Charred.

Kynan’s blood ran cold at the sight. He knew, of course, that dragons breathed flame. He knew in theory the destructive power of fire. But to see its evidence in stark black on a field of white reminded him again. These were corpses of mere trees. Imagine the agony, the ruin, a beast with such a dread power could wreak on a frail mortal.

He thought perhaps this might be just one corner of the vale burned by the creature, but as he travelled steadily downward, every tree he saw was blackened. The rocks and earth were scorched. Not a green thing grew, here. And he began to imagine that the dragon had burned the entire valley—and every living thing in it.

Yet his mother was alive. He knew that. He had that assurance by the steady breath of her slumbering body, lying in state in the queen’s pavilion at home in the Wake, unchanging and unmoving, but alive.

The dragon had not killed her. All of this devastation, and it had not harmed her. Why? For what purpose did it hold her, locked away in that tower, floating above the clouds amid a scorched vale?

He could not guess, but he was glad, at least, that she was there. Better alive and captive than dead. At least this way he might have a chance of rescuing her.

His descent brought him to the valley floor. He knew for the ground levelled out beneath his feet. The fog was less here, but not gone. All around, in every direction, he could see nothing but ranks of trees like silent, coal-black soldiers. Trees, and stone.

As he moved forward, in the direction he thought he ought to go, huge slabs of stone materialized out of the mist. Some of them were natural, but many clearly part of some vanished structure, smooth and carved, and inlaid with metals and gems. There were so many colours and designs that they couldn’t possibly have come from just one building. These broken pieces had been taken from elsewhere and dropped here, as carelessly as a child dropping a handful of random pebbles.

The night was wearing on. The moon had long ago set, or so he thought by the lessening of the diffuse light on the mist above. Where it had gleamed faintly silver before, now it was a dull red, as though lit by the glow of a distant fire. Perhaps it was.

He travelled slowly, steadily westward, or thought he did. It was impossible to know for sure in this shrunken world of twists and turns and sense-numbing fog. Some distance along the valley floor he came to a void in the trees, where the ground sloped abruptly down away from him.

As he continued, tentatively, he found the trees had vanished altogether up ahead. The ground was hard, like baked clay, and studded with rocks. Then he found a skeleton of a fish, perfectly preserved in the clay, and realized he was standing in what had once been the shallows of a lake. A vast lake, by the looks of it.

He looked at the fog in a new light. After all, he’d wondered why here, alone out of all of Everdream, such thick cloud might gather. Now he knew. It was the lake, blasted out of its shores by a boiling flame, and exiled to the air where it hung in morose coils. The dragon had not only burned the forest, but had evaporated an entire lake with its heat.

In my upcoming historical novel Hold Fast, I tell the story of Ann MacLean‘s real-life struggles in Canada’s first refugee camp, Machiche.

A place of conflicting identity, Machiche is the perfect setting for the story of a woman from two worlds.

The camp of Machiche was put together on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, on a Seigneury owned by Conrad Gugy, a Swiss immigrant and Justice of the Peace. The Seigneurial system of Quebec harkened back to the feudal structure of the Middle Ages, where a few wealthy lords owned the land, and peasants worked it in exchange for protection. Gugy donated a corner of land for the sudden influx of refugees flocking across the border from America during the Revolution—essentially to keep an eye on them.

Here was a place that straddled two worlds—the old system of lords and peasants, manors and rents, alongside the egalitarian ideals of the American colonies.

Ann would have been perfectly at home in the elegant manor houses in the area. She easily would have graced their dinner tables and balls. It was, after all, the kind of life to which she had been raised by her grandparents.

But instead she lived in the camp with the other refugees, crowded into wooden barracks-style buildings measuring approximately 18×40 feet. Leading up to the first winter, there were so few of these structures that they had to crowd together in groups of about sixteen. The women were expected to sew for their living at a lower rate of pay. Rations were scarce, and the refugees had to supplement them with food they could forage or hunt, difficult to do during the winter. Inevitably, corruption crept in and some refugees took more than their share of the food. The refugees were forbidden from leaving the camp to seek out additional provisions elsewhere.

Ann was no stranger to manual labour, having grown up in a small cottage in the village of Dunvegan. She would have known how to prepare game and cook it, to grow vegetables, to spin, weave, sew, and mend clothes, and to keep house. She wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. But Machiche was the proving ground that would put every resolve to the test.

If the historical record is any indication, Ann was lucky to leave Machiche alive.

In my upcoming Young Adult Fantasy novel Everdream, one of the most important characters spends the whole book sleeping.

Queen Aderyn, young Prince Kynan’s mother, may be Dreaming quietly throughout her son’s quest, but her story is the catalyst for his journey and for a change that will change the face of Everdream and the Wake alike.

Prince Kynan knows very little about his mother. Since she fell into the Eversleep when he was only five, he has few, though happy, memories. But beyond his age, there seems to be a hush over the topic of the queen, her disappearance, and the land of Everdream. His father, King Kedrych, has ordered this silence.

Aderyn was once a commoner. Kynan knows that much. Quiet, gentle, and sad, she never fully acclimatized to royal life, but spent more and more time withdrawing into Everdream. Though she is plain, unremarkable in appearance, almost to the point of homeliness, Kedrych called her his “fair one”. Kynan still believes that his mother was the only one who truly understood and loved him.

As Kynan journeys on his quest, he grows to know his mother more—and to learn a side of her that he never glimpsed in the Wake.

For in Everdream she had another life and a secret love. In Everdream she was called the Fairest Maid, the most powerful, talented Dreamer of all.

Kynan might find that the mother he loved was someone he never really knew at all.

The American Revolution wasn’t the beginning of only one nation. It was the catalyst to the birth of a second, too.

Think about it. Without the American Revolution, how different would Canada be?

Before the war, Canada was nothing more than an annexed territory, won from the French after the Seven Years’ War. In the province formerly known as New France, French Colonial law and culture still ruled. Feudal Seigneurs owned vast land tracts along the St. Lawrence which they meted out to subsistence farmers. The wealth imbalance tipped even further when the Catholic Church got involved.

The rest of Canada was largely untouched by European influence, aside from military forts around the Great Lakes and intrepid trappers canoeing by river into the wilderness, First Nations still held sway.

But then the American Revolution struck, and a figurative line in the sand became a literal border between two newborn nations. Thousands of Loyalists, displaced from their homes and fleeing for their safety, fled across the border into refugee camps in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

Frederick Haldimand, governor of the province of Canada, had an interesting problem. On the one hand he had a deeply entrenched French culture, who no doubt harboured resentment for their defeat and subsequent British rule. Then he had an influx of colonial American refugees, some of whom might bring along secret republican sympathies. Mixing these two groups could have been explosive.

But Haldimand had other ideas. Rather than allow the new refugees to mix with the established French order, he encouraged them to stay in the refugee camps until the end of the war, when he offered land grants in previously unsettled areas. Many settled in the maritimes, but others formed communities in the Gaspé, near modern-day Kingston, and—like my ancestor Josiah Cass, whose story figures in my upcoming novel Hold Fast—in L’Orignal in Eastern Ontario.

This practice of land grants reached an all-time high following the War of 1812, when the government of Upper Canada scrambled to populate the vulnerable American border and create a larger population from which to draw militia in any future war. It was during this mass settlement that my ancestor William McKillican followed his congregation from Scotland to the woods of Glengarry County and settled on his own land grant, as told in my historical novel, Across the Deep.

For good or ill, the American Revolution changed the landscape of a whole continent, and shaped the future of not just one nation, but two.

In my novel Otherworld, I introduced a little object that has some significance for the main character, Emma Delaney—a small mirror. Cale Kynsey gives it to her to show her some important things about herself. But there are things we can learn from the mirror, too.

Emma’s mirror shows her three different reflections of herself: How she looks to the rest of the world, how she views herself, and how she truly is.

It may seem like these three images should be one in the same, but for Emma, and for most of us, they’re not.

Have you ever had the experience where someone close to you has spoken some truth about you, about the way they see you, that you find hard to believe because it doesn’t match the way you see yourself? In fact, I would guess that most of us have a much less favourable view of ourselves than others do. We have a hard time believing that others can find us beautiful, talented, brave, or strong, because we don’t see it.

I’d like to suggest that the way we view ourselves is skewed. That’s not so much of a stretch. But I think that the way others view us is distorted, too.

After all, if we can’t know ourselves for who we really are, then why would we think that others can? But if we can’t, and others can’t, then who really knows what we are?

Think of a work of art. People in an art gallery can view it, interpret it, muse over it. But only the artist can say what it really means. Only the artist can reveal its true purpose.

That was why Cale gave Emma the mirror—so she could always see how she truly looks to him. To her creator.

What about you? Are you trusting your own distorted view of yourself? Are you leaning on the praise or criticism of others? Or are you looking in the mirror that shows you who you really are, who you were created to be?

One of the fun things about doing research for my historical fiction based on a true story, Hold Fast, is finding out about real-life characters that fit into the story. Among the people Ann MacLean would have known at the refugee camp at Machiche, Quebec was the Loyalist captain Jeptha Hawley.

Jeptha first came to my attention where he was listed in one website as being the brother in law of Josiah Cass, my ancestor. But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence elsewhere for the connection. It remains true, however, that he was certainly someone Ann and Josiah knew, and knew well.

Jeptha, at the time living in Arlington, Vermont, joined the British Army in 1776 after Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys persecuted his family and confiscated his property. He received the rank of Captain and led men in the disastrous Battle of Bennington, after which point he was given permission to take his family to safety.

He and his wife Esther, along with their eight children, travelled with Josiah and Mercy Cass to Machiche, where he was apparently put in charge of the refugee camp. One can only imagine what a difficult job that would have been—keeping order among thousands of displaced people, distributing meagre rations fairly, and watching many die of disease and scarcity—including his own wife—during the six years spent there.

After the war the refugees received land grants from the government. While Josiah Cass chose Chaleur Bay in the Gaspé Peninsula, Jeptha Hawley took his family to Cataraqui—modern-day Kingston—where he built what is now the oldest house in the area, in the village of Bath.

In my new YA fantasy novel Everdream, in the middle of the land of Tyernas, on a hill overlooking a wide river, stands its capital—the home of the king, Castle Cairdrist. Aside from the odd rare trip with his father, Cairdrist is the only place Kynan has ever known.

At first glance, Cairdrist looks much like any late medieval castle, but there are some important differences.

Built of limestone and granite imported from the sea coast, the castle looks grey most of the time, though in the right light it looks almost golden. It is built in a cluster of towers and halls, encircled by two protective walls with gates that stand open except in time of war. Its great hall is large enough to hold all of the great lords of the kingdom, and many common folk as well.

Kynan spends most of his time between the library, which boasts a large collection of rare books and scrolls, the training yard, where he practices his fighting skills, and his tapestried quarters. He enjoys watching the smiths work in the armoury, and he may also pay a visit to his father’s advisor, Lyr, in his offices. But he will only go to the throne room or his father’s private audience chamber if he is summoned there. Having grown up in the castle, he knows all the secret passageways that join all his favourite haunts, so he can slip from place to place without being observed.

But the place he most often visits, especially when he is in turmoil, is the Queen’s Pavilion. Centred in the manicured gardens within the inner wall, the pavilion is a domed rotunda carved and painted with scenes of a dream world. The dominating feature is a bed, where Queen Aderyn sleeps the Eversleep, attended at all times by four ladies in waiting. The king had it built for her when she first arrived at the castle, and often she would beg him to leave his throne to Dream with her, but he seldom did.

Now the Queen’s Pavilion only serves as a reminder to Kynan of all he has lost, and launching point for the adventure that will prove his worthiness to all the doubters.